[Buddha-l] Kalupahana

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Thu, 2005-06-30 at 10:36 +0200, Stefan Detrez wrote:
> 
>         Does anyone have an opinion about David Kalupahana?  That is,
>         would
>         you regard him as a reliable and insightful Buddhist scholar?
>  
> I don' know him personally, but I read his 'Ethics in Early
> Buddhism' (EEB), which, in my beginning years in the study of
> Buddhism, was quite impressive. 

I agree with Stefan on this. Kalupahana's early work was quite good. I
learned from his discussion of ethics and from his treatment of
causality. At some point in his career, however, Kalupahana became so
committed to the idea that early Buddhism was an early form of Logical
Positivism that his presentations of Buddhist philosophers became almost
ludicrous. His treatment of Nagarjuna, for example, is simply awful. His
translations of the MMK are riddled with errors, and his interpretations
are strained and artificial. 

> Now, however, I find his attempts to 'synchronize' Buddhist ethics
> with Western ethics/pragmatism/utilitarianism a bit flawed and
> compulsive. You can wonder what his agenda is to try and observe
> similarities between them.

I see Kalupahana's work part of a larger pattern of post-colonial
intellectuals trying to overcome their shame at having been colonized.
The strategy seems to be to identify what the colonists value most in
their culture and then to show that that very thing is found in a much
more refined form in the colonized culture. The British, for example,
are supposed to value rationality, epistemological accountability and
justice and to decry superstition. So intellectuals from South Asia are
prone to arguing that Buddhism (or Hinduism or Jainism or Confucianism
or Daoism) is much more deeply rational, anti-superstitious, and just-
minded than anything ever found in the West. The Buddha thus comes to be
portrayed as someone who succeeded to do what Descartes, Hume, Kant,
Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Russell, Derrida (or whoever your
favorite European modern or post-modern philosopher may be) failed to
do. Kalupahana fits this pattern very well. Not only is his version of
the Buddha the best philosopher imaginable, but most Western thinkers
(the very one he takes as standards of excellence) end up looking rather
shallow and flat when compared to Kalupahana's fantasies of the Buddha. 
And so Kalupahana joins a rather long queue of Asian intellectuals whose
agenda was to show the superiority of Asian thought. (There was a
similar phenomenon in Africa in a movement called the Negritude
Movement, the aim of which was to show that black people were much
better at living up to the lofty aspirations of white people than white
people ever were.) 

> Kalupahana is interesting to study how Western discourse is attempted
> to fit Buddhist discourse in explanatory models. But that's food for
> thought for literary critics, and less so, buddhologists.

Yes, that is nicely said.

-- 
Richard Hayes
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes